Friday, February 12, 2010

After my upgrade to KDE 4.4, I noticed that kopete's facebook plugin was making kopete crash just when it connected to facebook. While looking for an updated version of the plugin I ran across this blog post from duncan mcvicar's (one of the lead developers of kopete) explaining that there wasn't a need for that plugin anymore since Facebook added XMPP support for their chat service this week. Now, you can use any jabber client to connect to Facebook's chat. Duncan's blog post is missing details about how to accomplish this so I'm going to explain how to setup your chat account here.

First, you need to assign a chat user name to your facebook account, you will not be using your email address for this. Go to your account settings and set it up. After you have done that you can create a jabber account on kopete. Use your new facebook username like this: username@chat.facebook.com :

Then configure the connection setting to not use TLS and allow plain text authentication:

And last, do not forget to disable jingle support as it only works with gmail/gtalk accounts:

That's it, you now will be able to connect to facebook chat service from kopete and avoid opening a browser just for that.

Updated (02/16/2010): repository URL's changed and 64 bits packages are now available :)

This last Tuesday KDE SC 4.4 was released and on a lightning-fast time, neoclust managed to have packages available for Mandriva 2010 on KDE official FTP mirrors (thanks neoclust !!). If you want to upgrade to it, it's really easy. First, Add the KDE 4.4 repository, for 32 bit systems use the following urpmi command (as root):

After adding the KDE 4.4. repository you will need to update, download and install all of KDE 4.4 packages. You can do all of this in one command, but I, for safety, prefer to do it in two steps. First, update the repositories and download all the packages before actually installing them to make sure that the installation is possible:

urpmi --auto-update --auto-select --test

When all packages finish downloading and you see a message at the end saying that the installation is possible, you can now run the same command without the --test parameter to perform the installation:

urpmi --auto-update --auto-select

After the package installation finishes, logout and log back in, that's it !! you will have a brand new, shiny, awesome and rocking KDE 4.4 desktop :D